delta v over delta t when there is no t

[ertia]

In a bar, there is a girl.

She looks like she has saved up all of her decadent and slothful impulses for a solid decade and is indulging them all at once. She is sprawled on a couch with a book she's only half-reading, and an ice cream sundae, and smiiiiiiling.

Comments

[cheerfulish]

"Okay."

[ertia]

Hey, you, she says to Milan, first, how should I refer to you to third parties who don't know you by name, second, found a world needs stuff done.

[first_and_final]

Ooh, stuff. Tell me of the stuff, I'll be right in. And I don't know, how would you like to refer to me? 'Friend', 'partner', 'boyfriend', 'mate', depending on context?

[ertia]

Stuff is ravening fiends and global climate problems which I will handle, and immediate supply bottlenecks for the survivors for you. Probably also resurrections; if they've had a major recent die-off we can batch it and they'll all have places to go, I think. I went with 'partner'. Considered 'dragon' but it wouldn't have communicated anything to her.

[first_and_final]

'Partner' seems most effective for communicating why you want to call in some guy before you haul off to somebody's world and fix all their problems.

He strolls in the back door, sparkling radiantly, and approaches Kithabel and the troubled stranger.

[ertia]

"This is Milan. Milan, this is... a person whose world is troubled in climate and by ravening fiends."

[cheerfulish]

"Jannivae," she says. "Pleased to meet you. Particularly if you can help with my troubles."

[first_and_final]

"I'm pretty confident that we can."

[ertia]

"It's our thing!"

[first_and_final]

[cheerfulish]

"Your confidence is very cheering," says Jannivae. She opens the door. Outside: a wide stone hallway lined with many heavy wooden doors.

[ertia]

Kithabel gives Milan a kiss, extinguishes ravening fiends from the face of the planet, and teleports to high up for a good birds-eye look at the climate.

[first_and_final]

The climate: is kinda trashed. It is not raining anywhere in sight, and she can see quite a ways. There are dead plants in a lot of places, although in some places the fiends have already eaten up even the lifeless husks of trees, leaving the ground completely bare.



What's that smudge on the horizon?

Oh hey, it's an improbably huge raging thunderstorm! That might be a good starting point for investigating the climate problems.

(Meanwhile, Milan gets the ten-second version of the essence shortage problem and starts making lots and lots of essence spheres.)

[ertia]

Kithabel goes and has a look at the improbably huge thunderstorm.

[pythbox]

It is improbably huge, and a thunderstorm. The intense unceasing rain has flooded everything nearby, causing widespread destruction, and the frequent lightning isn't helping anything.

Outside of the improbably huge thunderstorm there is no rain occurring on the entire rest of the planet.

[ertia]

Hmm.

Kithabel would like a picture of the planet as it was Before This Thing.

[pythbox]

There were living plants, and recognizable weather systems!

[ertia]

And if she scans it forward...?

[pythbox]

This spot has completely ordinary weather patterns and clear skies. Now it has a pleasant amount of rain. Now the pleasant amount of rain is growing into an unpleasant amount of rain. Now the giant raging thunderstorm is eating all of the other rainclouds on the planet - not directly and overtly sucking them in, but growing larger and larger while they wither and shrink. Now there is a horrible drought everywhere else, while this area floods catastrophically.

[ertia]

Right. All of the water in this rainstorm and underlying floods should go about its business in its normal patterns at once.

[pythbox]

The water obligingly does that.

There's still something pretty clearly wrong: at the center of the former storm, some sort of ominous black mass sits at the bottom of a crater or pit, undulating unpromisingly while mud and sand from the pit walls occasionally slide into it and disappear with little flashes of light.

[ertia]

It will reveal its secrets to Kithabel at once.

[pythbox]

It is a large self-sustaining alchemical reaction! The black goo is semi-solid impure Void essence. Anything it touches is destroyed, releasing an uncontrolled burst of essence gases which in turn go on to react unpredictably with their surroundings. It is currently working on chewing through the bedrock under this formerly pleasant valley, and when it contacts the magma under the planet's crust, everyone's problems are going to get a whole lot worse.

Before Kithabel fixed that part, it was massively deranging the planet's weather patterns as a side effect of some complex interactions involving byproduct essence gases. It would go back to doing that if she went away and left it alone for a while, but is currently not up to much except slowly consuming the surrounding landscape.

Destroying the entire mass of black goo would fairly straightforwardly stop it from causing any further problems.

[ertia]

So she destroys the entire mass of black goo. Begone.

[pythbox]

Now it is gone! There is just this large unsightly hole in the ground where it once was.